


kill it, if you have to

by sculpture_ofmist_andlight



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey (Star Wars) is a Mess, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Tatooine (Star Wars)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sculpture_ofmist_andlight/pseuds/sculpture_ofmist_andlight
Summary: You said I killed you — haunt me, then! ... I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you.
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	kill it, if you have to

**Author's Note:**

> So, "The Rise of Skywalker" really took a big dump on Rey's character psychology, eh? Consider this an attempt to fill a gaping chasm in my heart. Less a fix-it than an attempt at redeeming what right now looks like very bad canon choices. Getting to the Reylo bits will be hard work actually.

The dead don't speak. Not in the way Rey thought they did, when Luke Skywalker, who never quite resolved to be her master as a living man, caught the lightsaber before it met the flames. Not like the white-eyed living dead thing whose offspring she was and that strived so hard to swallow up the life it had brought into existence. The dead only speak when they need us, she thought, levitating amidst stones suspended in air just so that the life-force that ran through her would not rust and vanish, and when that need is fulfilled they all dissolve again into that dreaded _somewhere_ that surrounds us, but where we can never reach them. Rey opened her eyes and squinted against the red and white beams of the suns. The Sith, the Jedi, it was a war that predated even the birth of this _thing_ that claimed to be her grandfather. Rey slowly lowered the rocks into the sand around her. She remembered first reading about it in the ancient texts that Luke Skywalker had kept locked away for so long, the sheer _scale_ of it all, and feeling awfully small besides it. But also: growing, rising to the occasion. There must be a place for her in all of this, she thought back then, she would have a place in this story. Rey knew it now, knew it all too well, a place already carved out for her when the only story she wanted to be in was one where she could be a daughter again. She was all the Jedi. Palpatine. Skywalker. It had been the war of the dead, they had merely needed the living to fight it.

The war is over. Rey wondered whether that last war of the living had ever really reached this desert, if it ever took the time to ravage the wide open fields of sand and stone. Or if life had long ago quietly retreated and hid under rocks and in deserted moisture farms. BB-8 whirred around her, ever the gentle reminder; the suns were setting, the market would soon close. She mounted the speeder; she did not put on her helmet; she let her hair down; she would move through the arid, static air so fast that it would bend to her will to be wind in her hair.

She was not alone, not always, on these market visits she would wait until more and more people gathered by a small fire when the suns had finally set. There were old crones and grimy, sunburnt faces and sometimes, rarely, children. The Hutts had not given up their hold on Tatooine, some cities were still thriving while sucking moisture from the barren land, but still, this world was dying. Rey loved children. There were few things – people – in the world that she loved as much as the little boy and girl she had sometimes seen by the market fire in the weeks that she's been here; they were smart in ways people often unlearn growing up, and had their hopes not yet dashed by knowing. There were few living things that she loved at all anymore. Rey recoiled at the thought of ever being a mother. With what she had learned about mothers in her life and in the war, she knew better than to ever become one. After a small group of people had settled by the fire, an older woman asked her if she really was the daughter of Luke Skywalker, _the_ Skywalker, the orphaned boy who went away after the attack on the moisture farm and never came back, and who had really become somebody, _something_. How much of the war or the peace had really reached this place? Things changed at a different, an indifferent pace here. Rey wanted to give a good and satisfying answer, but any answer would have been a lie; at the end she settled for the lesser one. No, not his daughter, not like that, but...adopted by him? Leia? Protected? Had he, really? Rey had seen their shimmering apparitions weeks ago, when the same old woman asked for her name and she yet again had stumbled over the chasm in her history, she had looked at them for blessings. They did smile at her, but vanished right after Rey had uttered their family name and did not appear ever since.

Back at the moisture farm Rey let water drip into the soil of the little flower she had picked up after arriving on Tatooine. The nightbloomer must have long withered back on Jakku, waiting for her, she thought. This desert flower should be robust enough, as everything here was, but still in this new home its leaves were starting to become brittle. Had Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle – not even his real parents, as she had learned by the fire gatherings, just silent protectors – ever owned houseplants? She had come to this place for history, but there was little left of it. Even the ghosts had long abandoned this place. What kind of protectors – parents? - had Owen and Beru been?  
What kind of father would Luke Skywalker have been?  
Do you really want to know?  
The gnawing conscience at the back of her mind sounded an awful lot like him. Rey shook her head, wanted to apologize – to whom? The dead don't speak, the dead don't listen. There were things she still forbid herself from thinking, imagining, _remembering_ , and one of them was this voice: quiet, prodding, not really gentle, as it had sounded back on Ahch-To. You can't stop needing them. Looking for them everywhere. Luke and Leia wouldn't show up, they had no need for her anymore, Han couldn't, her parents never did, and even he had not the decency to haunt her. Rey knew she would lose sleep again, her heart would always start to race and not cease when she cut one question too deep into her skin, and in those last weeks on Tatooine she had found answers for very few of them. She laid down on one of the cool, stony beds, the blanket left beside her. A restless energy was whirring in her legs and fingers. Where are you, she thought. You have got to be _somewhere_. Out of reach not because so far away, distance meant nothing with the hyperspace just above your head, but because he was _too close_ : where her eyes could not focus, where she could not reach out, absorbed, dissolved into an energy no longer recognizable, no longer human and thinner than air, and finally, vanished? Be with me. Be with me! Haunt me!  
Rey squinted her eyes shut, tried to will herself into unconsciousness, opened them when objects around her started to jitter and levitate. The wound of the bond from which Palpatine had drained the energy was only a faint, numb ache now, perhaps that was a mercy. Rey placed a hand on her ribcage and stared at the ceiling. The Force had tried to claim her, as she had tried to claim the Force, as a daughter of darkness and then as all the Jedi – dead, dead, dead Jedi. This pain was hers. It was that hard, and that simple.  
The dead don't speak. Tomorrow she would have to take the X-Wing and find the living who do.


End file.
